Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains

[don]

Re: Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains

According to the statistics you posted, the second highest country on that list is Afghanistan. So according to your logic, the higher up a country is on the list, the better it is to move to? Should I choose to go to Afghanistan (#2) instead of, say, Luxembourg (#54)? And keep in mind, Mexico lost 2 million according to that list. Where do you think they went? Why? How does that affect the US numbers? How many Swedes immigrate to the US? Why? You have to dig a little deeper than to blindly accept conventional wisdom.

Yes, indeed we have the largest economy, but what the OP implies is that the pie has a lot fewer slices than it did in the past - and the trend is getting worse. I guess we can brag to those Europeans that not only do we have more parasitic corporate masters - but they are on average, richer too!

You say I am trying to weaken the USA - maybe I'm not the one trying to weaken the USA - maybe it's you for being easily programmed by the elites. If you believe the USA is strongest when wealth is most concentrated - and that government should be run by the plutocracy to maintain and grow that wealth gap, then that, I have issue with.

The game is rigged my friend. And don't be fooled by those political "patriots" that often say "God bless the United States." They serve the plutocrats at everyone else's expense. If they were honest, they would be saying: "God bless my wealthy patrons!"

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson, 1775

[rjwjr]

Re: Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson, 1775

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Boswell tells us that Samuel Johnson made this famous pronouncement that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel on the evening of April 7, 1775. He doesn't provide any context for how the remark arose, so we don't really know for sure what was on Johnson's mind at the time. However, Boswell assures us that Johnson was not indicting patriotism in general, only false patriotism. Apparently, Samuel Johnson didn't have an issue with patriotism. Do you?

[MarkL]

Re: Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains

Everybody thinks that their world view is the right one, and the the one opposed to their thinking is incorrect -- once that feeling comes in, then people start to resort to pejoratives.

YEA! Those stupid idiots!

[sadsack]

Re: Top 1 Percent of Americans Reaped Two-Thirds of Income Gains

Maybe because the reason for the wealth among the lower quintiles was based on lack of competition from abroad in the manufacturing sector. When those industries started facing competition and then being outsourced oversees, you lost the wealth generator.

IMHO this is among the most likely of explanations. Few of us alive today have personal experience of the PROFOUND devastation that occurred in the rest of the world in the wake of WWII. I've heard second-hand stories - it was not pretty - the proof is the pronounced reduction in height of all persons born in the closing years and the immediate aftermath of the war in these countries. They're on average 3 - 6 inches shorter than prior and subsequent generations.

Even in the position of "supplier to the world" immediately after WWII, the US faced a potential postwar depression. We were the China of the early 1940's via Lend-Lease, then in the latter '40's with the Marshall Plan.

The only difference between then and now is that, by and large, the devastated economies of the (later to be designated) First World used American credit to rebuild their infrastructure - a relatively constructive endeavor.

The US, in contrast, has devoted itself to a similar strategy of the Roman Empire, where manufacturing was increasingly dominated by centralized facilities in far-flung provinces of the Empire. I suppose the argument then was as is now - "economy of scale," "wage arbitrage," etc..

The end result back then, was that once all the decentralized producers were driven out of business by the combines/monopolies, and later when the monopolies ("too big to fail") themselves failed, no one was left with the requisite skills to maintain civilization.

I don't believe that complete collapse is imminent; the point is that the collective industrial skills of a nation are a perishable resource. They can be completely lost, so that they must be painfully relearned as an individual suffers through physical therapy. The big example is China: in the 15th century, China was the largest iron producer. It has taken nearly 600 years for China to regain its prior status. How is willing is the US to hollow out its industrial know-how for marginal short-term gain? The crack addict analogy applies here . . .